Movie Review-Sanitarium

Review-Sanitarium is a three short story anthology that the stories are all based on the patients who lived thru them. Each one does not have a title but go by the number of the patient. Dr. Stenson played by Malcolm McDowell serves as some kind of host to the tales. How we get into the tales is we watch the Dr. as he examines each of their mental health and tells us what brought them to go insane. The first story which became my favorite centers around a tortured artist named Gustav who seems to be becoming extremely paranoid of the people in his life. We are told he is rich and famous, but from the way he carries and conducts himself, we would never guess. Well, we find out a bunch of dolls seem to be communicating with him about what to do. Gustav never starts to question his sanity, and just basically kills who the dolls tell him are trying to rob him. What I loved about this first story was that it just worked. From Robert Englund playing Sam who we learn thru the dolls is ripping off Gustav, to the twist to this story which I mean you almost can see from a mile away but it still worked. The dolls provided a Full Moon little nod that was more spooky than any Full Moon doll movie or puppet movie. The second story falls under the category of struggling and too predictable. A young kid gets a demon to help him deal with his abusive dad. This one failed on so many levels to click with me, I just found it so done to death that nothing in it stuck out to me or kept my attention. Now that being said, the third story was an improvement, nowhere close to the first story but was not bad. A professor locks himself inside a bomb shelter knowing the apocalypse is coming. Well, he is haunted by those he left behind. This was a well told little nod to Twilight Zone, it just had me thinking so much that I did not know whether it was meant to entertain me or teach me a life lesson. I liked the majority of this film and found it entertaining, but it had so many flaws. The cast was good enough; the script was not the best. The actors in this film from John Glover, Robert Englund, Malcolm McDowell, Lou Diamond Phillips, and David Mazouz really worked in this film for the most part. At times there were issues, but you expect sometime with smaller scale horror films that not everything will be roses. I felt three stories for the running time of almost 2 hours was a bit much, that they should have cut the stories down some and added one or two more. Short is effective, drawn out is effectiveness after a lot of dialogue and story to get there. This film tried and for that I will give it a mild and I mean very mild recommendation.